Next Year in Havana

by Chanel Cleeton

The Cubans probably have the least to laugh about compared to everyone around them, but they laugh the loudest.

There’s a freedom to life here—no need to check status updates, or obsess over someone’s posted photos, or spend time crafting a cleverly worded line to share with hundreds of followers and friends. And at the same time, that freedom is an incredible indulgence, the abstention of a life available to me, the choice of it, whereas for the Cubans who live without the barrage of statuses about how much someone loves their spouse or that picture of a friend from grade school climbing Machu Picchu, arms flung out against the backdrop of a fortuitously setting sun, there is no choice. No freedom. Their exile from these things isn’t self-imposed; it was thrust upon them by a government that has been in power their entire lives. And so, the beauty of life here—the simplicity of it—is also the tragedy of it.

Ages pass before we come up for air.